It has been a long-time desire of the Rally Finland organiser AKK Sports to move the event to August – and now they got their wish. Next year, Finland’s biggest annual sports event Neste Rally Finland will be driven 1 - 4 August, which means that the event now returns to its traditional spot in the WRC calendar, where it has last been in 2015.

The Future Star Award which brought Teemu Suninen to the absolute top of the rallying world, undergoes through great changes in the years to come. The 2019 winner will still receive the traditional package to the Finnish round of the FIA World Rally Championship (WRC), Neste Rally Finland, but already one year from now a second winner will be awarded with a seat in the FIA Junior WRC or an equivalent WRC class for the 2020 season. At the same time the new programme created by AKK, M-Sport and Pirelli will be changed into the more dynamic Flying Finn Future Star Award.

The future of Finnish motorsport is strong thanks to the AKK’s Flying Finn initiative, which aims to unearth the new generation of driving talent in the country by encouraging wide-spread participation at grassroots level.

Last year’s Neste Rally Finland, the Finnish round of the FIA World Rally Championship, had a Finnish winner and a great financial result too. Before this year’s rally, the event organiser AKK Sports Ltd, the marketing company fully owned by the Finnish national sporting authority AKK-Motorsport ry, were cautiously hopeful – and now again positively surprised. Even without Finnish victory, Rally Finland was once again an all-round success.